Orange County voters have a new county superintendent for the first time in over a decade, but it isn’t one they picked.
It’s someone they rejected at the ballot box two years ago.
With little public discussion, members of the Orange County Board of Education unanimously appointed Stefan Bean to take over as superintendent of the county Department of Education for the next two years on Tuesday night.
Trustee Ken Williams Jr., who put Bean’s name up for consideration, said Bean would “bridge the discord,” in the current debates around education.
“This board has always sought the best interests of the children,” Williams said. “It is my honor as the senior member of this board to nominate Dr. Stefan Bean.”
Bean, who did not speak at Tuesday’s meeting, was born in Vietnam and raised in the US after he emigrated during Operation Babylift at the end of the Vietnam War.
In recent years, he’s been a leader for charter schools in Southern California, including in his current role as executive director and principal of the Irvine International Academy.
He will replace outgoing Superintendent Al Mijares who announced his retirement amidst his battle with cancer after quietly stepping away for nearly a year, leaving a position he’s held since 2012.
[Read: Orange County Superintendent Quietly Misses a Year on Medical Leave]
The position will ultimately go back to voters in the 2026 election, who have the final say on who runs the county Department of Education, a 1,400-person department that manages payroll and provides legal support to the county’s other 28 school districts.
The department also manages ACCESS, which offers continuation school and special needs education to students throughout the county, along with managing countywide charter schools.
Mijares fended off a challenge from Bean in 2022, keeping his seat with more than 52,000 voters picking him over Bean – a nearly 10% margin.
In Mijares’ final years as superintendent, he frequently clashed with the board of education.
Board members argued they should have more oversight of the department’s operations while Mijares said that wasn’t their role.
Bean has vowed that won’t be the case in his administration, promising board members his top priority will be to give them a say in the budget, charter schools and alternative education in his public interview at a board meeting last month.
“It will be my imperative to first establish and maintain an effective working relationship with this board,” Bean said in his May interview. “I’d like to set up these committees in which we can invite one or two board members … to look over the department budget. To look over the charter school plan. To look over alternative education, before these decisions are made.”
By only having two of the five members join, those reviews and meetings do not have to be conducted publicly under California transparency laws.
He also promised to end the yearslong lawsuit between the Board and Mijares regarding which of the two has final say over the county Department of Education’s $350 million budget, saying they would find “mutually beneficial resolutions.”
[Read: OC Board of Education, Superintendent Spend $3 Million in Legal Battle to Pick Their Own Lawyers]
Bean also pledged to be a strong ally to charter schools, where he’s spent most of his educational career, saying he wanted to “further expand,” the board’s work supporting charters and open up more parental options for education including charter, private and homeschools.
“I believe in parental rights and parental right to choose which school their child goes to,” Bean said. “We have adversaries of parents trying to block their choice, so I’m 100% behind intra and inter district transfers.”
Bean also said programs like social-emotional learning had harmed children, and that the state’s “overreaction” to the COVID-19 pandemic damaged student’s learning during lockdown.
“I’ve seen a mission drift where many schools, districts are focusing on more adult types of issues. These adult issues then creep into our academics,” Bean said. “I hope that one day we can set aside social politics and just get back to the basics of teaching our students academics.”
Bean said the same thing when he ran for superintendent two years ago, promising to end sex education in primary grades, but could not provide proof of such teaching happening when asked about it by Voice of OC.
[Read: OC Voters Asked To Pick Their County Schools Superintendent For First Time In Over Two Decades]
Noah Biesiada is a Voice of OC reporter and corps member with Report for America, a GroundTruth initiative. Contact him at nbiesiada@voiceofoc.org or on Twitter @NBiesiada.
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